On my swing through Tennessee and Alabama I made the time to visit two presidential museums. Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, a stately plantation house, is outside Nashville. About 50 miles south is James Knox Polk’s home in Columbia, not far from the Alabama line. Both are house museums, and both interpret the men and women who lived there as well as their eras. I’ll write about the Hermitage today and about Polk’s house when I write about my visit to the Tennessee State Museum.
Art historians are, first and foremost, historians. Artists, whom we study, are creatures of a time and place, and part of our work is to develop their story in these contexts. Beyond that, history is our invisible mover and shaker. None of us is an Adam or an Eve. Call it baggage, call it legacy, call it priceless example, but history is part of us.
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